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calculation in his head, he had to face the fact that he would not have enough time to sleep in all the beds available to him that night.
    His stomach gurgled.
    Like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house, the fakir—who was no more resistant to hunger than he was to tiredness, or to anything else for that matter—set off in search of a midnight feast. He entered the labyrinth of chairs in the living-room section and followed the directions for the restaurant written on the signs.
    In a large gray refrigerator, he found smoked salmon, and a Tupperware box full of crème fraîche, parsley, tomatoes and lettuce. He emptied this onto a large plate, got himself a cola from the drinks machine, put it all on a plastic tray, and walked back the way he had come.
    He chose a living room decorated with black-and-white lacquered furniture. On the walls, large framed sepia photographs of New York buildings provided a touch of class. He would never have found a hotel as luxurious as this forthe night, particularly not for €100, or rather for a €100 note printed on only one side.
    The Indian placed his tray on a coffee table, took off his jacket and tie, and sat on a comfortable green sofa. Across from him, a fake plastic television sparked his imagination. He pretended to switch it on so he could watch the latest Bollywood blockbuster while he had his smoked salmon, that strange but tasty little fluorescent orange fish, which he was eating for the second time in his life and the second time that day.
    It had not taken him long to get used to luxury.
    Once his meal was finished, he stood up and stretched his legs by walking around the table. It was while doing this that he noticed something on the bookcase behind the sofa that looked different from the books.
    It was a newspaper—a real one—that someone must have left there. Alongside it were rows of the fake books, those plastic bricks he had seen earlier that day in other bookcases on display in the store.
    As he did not speak French, he would not even have bothered opening it had he not recognized the inimitable front page of the American newspaper the
Herald Tribune
. This could be an entertaining evening, he thought. Hewas far from imagining just how entertaining it was going to be, though not for the reasons he expected.
    Ajatashatru pretended to switch off the television and began reading the news. He could not bear the television being on when he was not watching it; where he lived, electricity was a rare commodity. He read the article on the front page. The president of France was called Hollande. What a strange idea! Was the president of Holland called Mr. France, by any chance? These Europeans were decidedly odd.
    And what was he to think of this former ice dancer who, each year, on the anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death, moonwalked over five and a half thousand miles from Paris to the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery, in a suburb of Los Angeles, where his idol was buried? Ajatashatru was no geography expert, but he found it hard to imagine how the man would continue to practice that famous dance move while crossing the Atlantic, whether he was on board an airplane or a ship.
    Seized with a bout of nervous laughter and an irresistible urge to urinate, the Indian got up from the sofa and, in his socks, traversed the showcase living rooms—without moonwalking—in the direction of the toilets.
    But he never reached them.
    Voices and the sounds of footsteps coming from the main staircase suddenly broke the silence, momentarily transforming Ajatashatru’s narrow chest into the stands of a football stadium during a big match. Thrown into a panic, he looked all around and then hid inside the first wardrobe he saw—a sort of blue metal, two-door luggage locker, the signature piece of the all-new “American Teenager” collection. Once inside, he began praying that they would not notice his jacket, which he had left on the sofa a few yards from where he was hiding.